RE: FW: New TECHWR-L Poll Quest

[jgarison -at- ide -dot- com]

My SO is a programmer, and recently she was interviewing at a company. She's
been coding for quite a while, and one of the interviewers (a potential
peer, though much less experienced) asked her a question about some arcane
element of syntax for a C command. Well, she's been writing Perl scripts for
the last two years and, while a competent C programmer, didn't know the
answer. She did not get an offer. IMHO, this company lost their shot at
hiring a superb developer for the wrong reason. In Tech Comm terms, it would
be like not hiring a writer because they couldn't tell you the precise
syntax for some sort of field code date function in Word.

If you are going to give tests to people, make sure the test can accurately
reflect that person's knowledge and skills. Instead of asking a pointed and
overly detailed question, ask them how they would go about doing some task,
or ask they what tools they used, how they used them, and how they would
rate Tool A v. Tool B.. You'll get a lot better grasp of the person's
understanding of processes, people, and tools that way.

My 2¢,

John
John Garison
Documentation Manager
IDe
150 Baker Avenue Extension
Concord, MA 01742

Voice: 978-402-2907
Fax:    978-318-9376
http://www.ide.com



Wally Glassett wrote:

Asking a developer if they are knowledgeable about some function or
technique in some language tends to be a more specific question that should
have a specific response/answer, as compared to asking how one would do a
document. I am usually asked how I would go about producing a document, and
I think that's fair game because I can describe the processes I normally use
to gather and organize the information/content, as well as
techniques/approaches to presenting that information. IMO, discussing that,
along with reviewing my samples, constitutes a fair and reasonable "test" of
whether I know what I'm doing or not.

However, I have virtually no idea how often, or if, developers are asked to
write code during interviews, or if they bring "portfolios" of code samples
with them to interviews.

Any input(s) from the developers out there?

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